Amazon Rising: Debuts ‘Fire’ With Object Recognition, 3-D Views

By Tiernan Ray

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos debuts new “Fire” smartphone at a media event in Seattle. Photo courtesy of The Verge.

Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) are up 48 cents at $326.10, as founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled its “Fire” smartphone on stage in Seattle.

The device, with Corning‘s (GLW) “Gorilla Glass 3″ cover glass, sports a 4.7-inch display using “IPS LCD HD” technology, and Bezos said the device has better outdoor visibility than other smartphones, with “dynamic image contrast” and a “circular polarizer.”

The Fire runs a quad-core applications processor, at $2.2 gigahertz, though it doesn’t appear clear whether it is Qualcomm‘s (QCOM) or another vendor’s. It has a 13-megapixel rear camera and an f/2.0 lens. The device comes with unlimited photo storage, said Bezos, on Amazon’s “Cloud Drive.”

Bezos touted “tangle-free” headphones and stereo speakers.

Bezos talked up bundled music and video services, from its “Prime” subscription service. The phone has the ability to send whatever video one is currently streaming to the company’s “Fire TV” set-top. Bezos said the company had lavished attention on how to make Fire a “great phone for reading.”

Bezos showed how a feature called “Firefly” uses the phone’s camera to recognize objects in the real world, bring up information from the Web about them, and offer to let you buy objects, if available, on Amazon.

After demoing Firefly recognizing objects, Bezos finally moved on to what had been the mostly heavily speculated element of the unveiling in preceding weeks. He said the phone has a three-dimensional interface that gives depth to what is displayed on screen.

The device will be offered exclusively through AT&T (T) for $199 with a two-year contract, with 32 gigabytes of storage, or $299 for the 64-gigabyte version, starting July 25th. More from the press release here.

Update: As some sharp-eyed readers observed, the microprocessor for the phone is referenced as using the “Adreno” graphics core, meaning it is, indeed, Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon” family of apps processor running the thing. The press release referneced above confirms Qualcomm’s chip.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.